BECR Briefs and Tools

This brief describes strategies for communicating research findings to program managers and practitioners in USDA’s SNAP-Ed program, potentially leading to new intervention approaches that could impact the well-being of the many Americans reached by the SNAP-Ed program.

This brief aims to provide an overview of key considerations for researchers who wish to use sales data to evaluate the effectiveness of healthy retail interventions. This brief discusses key considerations for identifying the research question, forming a partnership with retailers, and data collection and analysis.

Food retailers can and should be seen as vital partners as we work to improve nutrition. This brief provides insights and strategies for establishing research partnerships with food retailers. This brief represents accumulated insights from researchers working with the following programs and projects: SNAP-Ed, BECR, NC Growing Together, and the RNECE-South, who have conducted healthy food retail interventions for 5 years with over 20 different corporate and family-owned retailers.

In collaboration with the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, the BECR Center drafted a brief to discuss the potential research opportunities for using behavioral economics strategies within the SNAP-Ed Program. This brief highlights text from the 2017 SNAP Education Plan Guidance.

Purchasing a healthy mix of food items is a key step toward improving diet and health. Researchers are increasingly focusing on this step, investigating strategies to promote healthy food purchasing. However, in a retail setting that encompasses thousands of items, choosing products to promote that are most likely to have a positive impact on consumers’ diets may require consideration. The purpose of this brief is to provide behavioral researchers with a quick reference to help determine which types of products to promote.

The Regional Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Centers of Excellence (RNECE) Southern Region at UNC- Chapel Hill recently presented a webinar on behavioral economics within the SNAP-Ed context. The field of Behavioral Economics provides valuable insight in understanding people’s behaviors and decision-making processes. This webinar will introduce key concepts from Behavioral Economics and discuss how SNAP-Ed agencies can leverage these concepts to “nudge” consumers to make healthier food choices in a retail setting.

Behavioral Economic nudges offer a range of techniques for influencing food-choice related behaviors in retail settings, including convenience stores, grocery stores and farmers’ markets. We summarize the research to date that has used behavioral economic techniques to nudge consumers to make healthier choices in places where we shop for food.